


There's a Story You Won't Tell

by ellieellieoxenfree



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-30
Updated: 2017-07-30
Packaged: 2018-12-09 00:04:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11657472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellieellieoxenfree/pseuds/ellieellieoxenfree
Summary: Hartley Rathaway is his own collateral damage.





	There's a Story You Won't Tell

**Author's Note:**

> This was way better in my head, but everybody says that.

Skin blackened, charred, peeling; he curls, instinctively, in on himself, pain a constant shrieking howl, worse than anything from the accelerator accident, worse than anything he’s ever experienced. He thinks he’s screaming, maybe, but he doesn’t know. He’s dimly aware of being in someone’s arms, all dead weight and agonized sobs, and then the night is gone and there are lights and beeping and something softer than the road underneath him. Someone is shouting next to him but he can’t make it all out — it’s too much, the noise and the pain and the smell of his own skin, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts —

Everything had been black and now it isn’t and his head is swimming. It’s all hazy. Hartley is trying to focus and everything is a mess of blurry shapes. His mouth is dry and his body feels heavy, but his hands don’t feel like anything. He tries to move and he’s sluggish and unresponsive.

‘Hartley.’ It’s familiar and quiet. He grasps for it desperately, unable to respond in kind. He remembers the voice — someone special, someone important, but who? There’s a light touch on him, someone pressing him down, the voice murmuring something about not moving. I can’t, he wants to say, but he can’t even do that, either.

His face is wet. Is he crying? He hates crying, wants to wipe the tears away, but his body won’t respond and the frustration is only making it worse. He tries to choke it back and ends up hiccuping. Someone is smudging away his tears with their thumb. Stop, he thinks desperately. Don’t touch me. Leave me alone. Get out. The darkness is creeping around the edges of his vision, but the person is still there, and he needs them to go before he can lose himself again.

He resents this stranger’s kindness, resents himself for being too weak to resist it. He wants to claw through the fog of his memory and piece it all together (he was at the dam; he remembers that much, that he was at the dam and something had gone wrong, and there had been so much pain). Why can’t he remember it? His hands, something had happened to his hands, something had happened to…God, he’s so tired, and there’s someone else’s cool hands — not like his, not blackened, not with the skin sloughing off — on his face, smoothing his hair. 

‘Sleep, Hartley,’ says the familiar voice, and the fingers rub gently at his temples. He wants, despite himself, to lean into the touch, but he knows he shouldn’t get distracted. Something had been destroyed, something had hurt him (someone had hurt him, hadn’t they?). He had done something. He remembers it in fragments: glass breaking, metal spinning through the air, a piercing noise. He remembers, incongruously, skyscrapers and skylights, the sound of footsteps on glass. Someone is cupping his face now in one hand, a gesture of indefinable tenderness, and he loses the images. He wants to protest, but only makes a mewling, incoherent noise. He feels the tears spill again, almost burning their way down his skin.

He’s being soothed, the voice whispering softly to him, and the inky darkness is so inviting. He’s so tired, too tired to fight, and it’s alright to let go, isn’t it? The voice is giving him permission, encouraging him, forgiving him. He can sleep now; he’ll remember it all when he wakes again.

—

‘Are you sure this is a good idea, Dr Wells? It must be a lot of strain, and you’ve said yourself he’s dangerous.’

‘Hardly dangerous in his condition. The drugs keep him asleep most of the time. Besides, it’s no trouble.’

‘Don’t you think we need to get him into the pipeline soon?’

‘All in good time. I appreciate your concern, Dr Snow, but I have the matter in hand.’

—

Hartley drifts in and out of awareness, the pain gradually bleeding into the edges of his consciousness. He can’t keep his eyes open for too long; the brightness of the lights pains him, and without his glasses, everything blends into one shapeless mass of differing colors. He learns to pick out the shape of the man with the familiar voice, but something — the drugs, he imagines — keep him from connecting a name to the shape. He still doesn’t know fully what’s happened. Everything slips away from him as soon as he starts putting the pieces into place, but in his lucid moments, he feels an overwhelming mixture of anger and grief and betrayal that he can’t quite process. He tries to speak to the stranger, his words still gluey. ‘Somebody hurt me,’ he attempts, but the words slur together and he doesn’t know if he’s being understood.

The only thing he knows he’s communicated is his anguish the first time the bandages on his hands are replaced. It feels as though someone has ripped the skin straight from the muscle and bone, and he screams, his body arching involuntarily off the bed. He smells it again: the scent of burning skin, the tang of blood. There are footsteps and something cold is pressed against his arm, but he can’t keep himself still. The familiar voice shouts for someone and then he’s being held down and there it is, there’s the familiar blackness, there’s the haven away from this.

How long has it been, he wonders. He has no frame of reference or method of timekeeping. He’s become his own unreliable narrator. The familiar stranger visits and feeds him periodically, propping him up against the pillows and spooning broth into his mouth. Inwardly, Hartley writhes in agony, deeply ashamed of his own inability to do this much. He tries holding his hands close in front of his face, but all he can make out is the stark white of the gauze, occasionally stained by yellow. He doesn’t know what he’ll find underneath — his hands feel disconnected from the rest of him, something held in place by the bandages and not by his own biology — and he isn’t sure he wants to know.

There are occasional moments of hushed voices somewhere he can’t quite place, but after the incident with his dressings, no one but the familiar stranger comes to tend to him directly. Now no chances are taken, and he feels the needle slide in to send him to sleep before the bandages are replaced. He wrestles with conflicting emotions — anger and helplessness and guilt and a horrible, inexplicable need for the stranger’s kind attentions. Hartley wants him (whoever he is) to leave and yet to be there with him always, and he struggles to reconcile the two.

He can tell when the dosage begins to taper off; the pain replaces it, duller now but still immense. He’s awake longer, the fragments starting to reform together into a coherent whole. He remembers more of the night on the dam. The Flash had been there and had very nearly died — that was his doing, Hartley remembers — and he can remember the green glow of his gauntlets and the way they seared into his skin as one final act of retribution. 

His eyes have finally adjusted to the light, and he asks the stranger for his glasses. It feels like an enormous step forward, closer to being whole (or as whole as he can be now, with his ruined hands and his damaged hearing). He wishes he could put them on himself, but he closes his eyes and tilts his head up and feels the stranger’s fingers brush over his face as the glasses are put into place. It’s a little strange, almost awkward, to be wearing them again. Hartley blinks rapidly, trying to come to grips with clear vision again.

‘Hello, Hartley,’ says the stranger at his bedside, and Hartley stares at Harrison Wells.

Hartley doesn’t know if this is real or illusory. Everything is slightly blurred around the edges; it all feels otherworldly. He wants to reach out and see if he’ll meet the resistance of another human body, but of course he can’t now. Pressure builds up behind his eyes and he finds himself bursting into tears again, horribly, shamefully, overwhelmed. There’s a swift kick of terror in his gut that he’s lost control in front of Harrison, but he can’t remember why (it’s wrong, his brain chants in intermittent, hysterical staccato; it all went wrong, he’s not — Hartley can’t hold onto the thought). 

‘Why are you here?’ he croaks shakily, his voice sounding foreign to his own ears. Harrison shouldn’t be here, should he? Something had happened. Something before the dam and the noxious smell of his own flesh cooking. It’s dangerous now (is he dangerous, is Harrison dangerous?) and he shouldn’t be here (wherever here is, he thinks, wildly). The pain in his hands, not as well-numbed by the drugs now, is spearing through his thoughts and disrupting him. 

Harrison has a hand in the middle of his back, steadying the trembling Hartley hasn’t even been aware of. ‘Lie back. Rest. You’re still delirious.’

No — this isn’t right. Harrison shouldn’t be gentle. He hadn’t been. There had been some form of unimaginable cruelty. Panic skitters through Hartley’s brain and he can’t assign a reason to it. He shouldn’t want to feel Harrison’s touch, but it’s steady and calming and familiar and he’s missed it. Everything in his head is jumbled and wrong, but this is the thing he wants to hold onto, if only he could silence the warning cries. 

Words feel thick in his mouth. ‘I need to know what happened.’

‘The Flash brought you here,’ Harrison says (the stranger says, the familiar stranger and his kind voice). ‘You were in shock from the injuries to your hands.’

‘Injuries,’ Hartley echoes. ‘An explosion.’ He tries to recall the fractured memories of the dam. He had almost killed the Flash — he was so angry about the Flash, knew he needed to die, because he had something, or had taken something, of Hartley’s. There’s a great yawning chasm of need that Hartley feels at recalling this, but it’s too much to process now. He still can’t make sense of a rescue by someone he’d nearly murdered, can’t understand why he’s lying in a bed with his hands swaddled in gauze, with Harrison Wells’ electric touch on his back. 

Hartley shakes his head, which sends a shudder of nausea through him. ‘I shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t be here.’ He’d done something horrible and yet he hadn’t been left in the street like a dog. (It would have been kinder, wouldn’t it, to have been put down where he lay?) This room is a spider’s web woven in steel, drawing him ever-closer, ever-tighter, and he looks at Harrison and sees nothing but a predator examining his wounded prey.

‘ _Amor animi arbitrio sumitur, non ponitur_ ,’ Harrison says, leaning back in his chair, his tone one Hartley had only ever heard him use when they were alone. We choose to love, we do not choose to cease loving. Hartley feels his heart stir for it even as his mind warns him away. 

‘You’re lying,’ Hartley blurts out, looking away, at anything that isn’t Harrison, afraid of what he’ll see if he meets Harrison’s eyes. He feels the pressure of Harrison’s hand on his arm, below the edge of the bandages, his thumb stroking in slow motions. Harrison Wells, forever calm and unruffled and unmoved, forever devastating in the softest of ways. Hartley stares at the wall and doesn’t pull away. ‘You’re _lying_ ,’ he repeats, sounding childish and pathetic. He wants to remember what happened between them, but the memory feels locked behind some door he can’t open.

Harrison makes a sound of concern. ‘We shouldn’t have tapered the dosage so quickly. We’ll have to adjust it.’ His thumb is still moving, dancing closer and closer to the bandage edge, the pressure feather-light, but the control unmistakable. Don’t be disobedient, Hartley Rathaway. I could snap your wrist in two.

’No,’ says Hartley anyway, desperate. Even though he’s missing all of the pieces, he knows he needs to be stronger than this. This is wrong, he reminds himself. He wills himself not to be lulled by Harrison’s touch, his voice, his presence. 

‘No?’ Harrison says, his hand tightening around Hartley’s arm. A bolt of pain shoots up from Hartley’s hand, and he fails to bite back a scream. 

The pain is so intense that he hardly registers the sound of footsteps, a door opening, a woman shouting. Harrison is no longer touching him, but the damage is done. Bile rises in his throat and someone thrusts a bowl in front of him just in time for him to expel the contents of his stomach. 

‘What happened?’ Hartley, coughing, spitting, gagging, recognizes the voice as Caitlin Snow’s. He vomits again.

‘He tried to get up and had to be restrained. I misjudged the pressure, I’m afraid, Dr Snow.’

Hartley chokes out, ‘It’s not true.’ His eyes are watering and his nose is running and he feels as though he’s going to heave again, but there’s nothing in his stomach left to come up. 

Harrison’s lies are smooth and effortless. ‘He’s slipping in and out. We’ll have to sedate him again.’

‘Please,’ Hartley begs, hating himself for having to plead for mercy from Caitlin, but knowing this is his only chance. 

‘Sedate him, Dr Snow,’ Harrison commands. There’s an edge to his voice now.

Hartley is nearly sobbing. ’Don’t do it, please. Don’t do it.’ He’s becoming agitated, and Caitlin snatches the bowl away before he knocks it over. ‘Caitlin, he hurt me.’

‘He thinks he’s still back at the dam. He’s been ranting about it for days,’ Harrison says. ‘He won’t stop talking about the Flash.’

‘It was you,’ Hartley cries. He doesn’t have much time left; he can’t even keep his eyes open without his stomach lurching, and the agony in his hands is swallowing whatever lucidity he has left. ‘You did this.’

‘Just prep the sedative. He’s a danger. He doesn’t know what’s going on.’

Hartley wishes he could control his brain, control his mouth, remember the whole story and spill it out to Caitlin, convince her to believe him. It’s too late now, though, because he can feel everything sliding to black, sounds fading, thoughts dematerializing. 

‘Can you hold him still?’

‘No,’ Hartley tries to say, but he can’t get it out, and he feels the coldness against his arm and the short, sick jab, and —

—

The bandages on Hartley’s hands are lighter now, and he can see the shining pink of the scars in a few spots. He tries to pick at the edges of the bandages, but there’s hardly any feeling left in his fingers, and his movements are clumsy. 

He curls up in the corner of the cell and buries his head into his knees. He wonders if he should cry or scream, but in the end, he wraps his shattered hands around himself and sits in silence.


End file.
